to have become as indelibly “French” as the settlers of European origin in Algeria would logically have entailed putting the harkis on the same boats “back” to France as the European refugees. Both the state-centered Contract and the Belief models of political membership favored that conclusion and pointed to such a commitment, above and beyond more general human rights claims. However, the policy implications of the Contract and Belief models were directly at odds with those of the Culture and Descent models. Ideas of political membership based on cultural affinity or ancestral ties, albeit with a larger European family, unfortunately came more decisively to the fore once Algeria’s independence was conceded. An immediate practical consequence was that French military personnel were ordered to discriminate ethnically between Muslim and other “French” refugees seeking passage to France.7
For years Contract and Belief ideas of political membership had contributed to legitimizing France’s political and territorial claims in Algeria and in colonies elsewhere. But after Algeria’s independence was granted and the longer process of what came to be understood as “decolonization” was thereby all but concluded, such broader Belief and Contract visions of political membership quickly lost much of their political cachet.8 The harkis’ treatment after the Algerian War illustrates how the Culture and Belief models can in practice have starkly contrasting entailments for policy, regardless whether the values and principles grounding Belief-based claims to political membership are truly universal or culturally relative. In this regard, the Culture and Belief conceptions of political membership are distinct from one another, just as they are analytically distinct from each of the other models of political membership.
Conclusion
Citizenship is a political form of membership, and we think about it in the same ways that we think about other memberships with which we are familiar. But there are several different kinds of memberships, and what we tend to talk about when we talk about belonging depends largely on what kind of membership we have in mind. With respect to most sorts of groups, this is not particularly problematic. We ordinarily have little occasion to contemplate the fact that our memberships in different sorts of groups are different in kind.
In the case of political membership, however, it is possible to think of belonging as modeled on each of the types of membership with which we are familiar in other spheres. Political membership may be understood and discussed as an unchangeable characteristic determined by descent, and thus as a particular case of No Exit membership. As with other memberships of that type, it figures as something one simply “is.” Or it may be discussed as something one “becomes,” a matter of acquiring and becoming defined in terms of a particular culture, and thus as a type of Change membership. At other times, it is discussed as if it were a Leave membership, a political membership defined in terms of subjective identification with a particular group and a project associated with it. It can also, however, be imagined as a form of Quit membership, a status conferring rights achieved on the basis of participation in or fulfillment of certain duties. In that case, the necessary condition for membership is then not what one is but what one does. Finally, citizenship may be discussed as if it were a form of Cancel membership, in which membership rights are granted to those who “pay their dues” through taxes, work, or economic investment. Citizenship, in that view, is defined neither by what one is nor by what one does but by what one contributes. One of the reasons discussions of political membership are often confused is that we are rarely altogether consistent in this regard. When we talk about belonging to a polity or political community, we wind up talking about disparate things: descent, cultural attachments, beliefs, civic duties and participation, and taxes and benefits. Table 2.3 summarizes the key features of our five main conceptions of political membership, and their relationship to our ways of understanding membership more generally.
One of the reasons for the intractability and confusion that surround current debates about the meaning, appropriate criteria, and implications of political forms of membership is that we do not even realize that these five very different models are in play. Our inconsistencies may well be an almost inevitable reflection of the multifaceted ways in which we understand and experience citizenship, but the fact that the existence and nature of these inconsistencies are seldom, if ever, consciously recognized makes for a good deal of confusion in public discussions of citizenship-related issues. The nature of some of these conflicts and the part they play in particular citizenship-related controversies is explored in the chapters that follow.
Table 2.3. Competing Conceptions of Political Membership
PART II
Failed Hopes for a “New Citizenship”: The Political and Intellectual Logic of Changes in Nationality Law
Chapter 3
The Campaign for a Post-National Model of Civic Membership
By the beginning of the 1980s in France, politicians and intellectuals were increasingly realizing that immigrants were permanently changing the face of French society. In response to this recognition, groups on the French left began championing what was often called a “new citizenship” or nouvelle citoyenneté. As understood by its proponents, nouvelle citoyenneté was to be a more inclusive citizenship disjoined from nationality. In practical terms, the main political demand associated with it was relatively simple: to extend local voting rights to foreign residents of areas where immigrants had settled. In symbolic and historical terms, however, many advocates saw the initiative as promising much more: nothing short of a conceptual revolution in established ideas of political membership. In marked contrast to more conservative observers who saw immigrants’ settlement as a source of potential national crisis, those championing such a “new citizenship” greeted the changing character of French society with enthusiasm. They saw it as heralding a new, more progressive and inclusive social order, and as promising nothing short of a radical displacement of the traditional nation-state with all its dysfunctions.
The “new citizenship” envisaged was “new” largely because it broke the traditional link between nationality, on the one hand, and citizenship as active political participation requiring possession of political rights, on the other.1 From the conventional perspective centered on the nation-state, only French nationals could be citizens. From the “new citizenship” perspective, public recognition of foreign citizens was possible. In fact, having foreign citizens was even a sign of historical progress. Their enfranchisement seemed to herald the imminent eclipse of an increasingly outdated and outmoded political paradigm in which the nation-state held pride of place.
The new citizenship campaign both participated in larger international trends and was in key respects uniquely French. The particular national flavor and character of this campaign in France owed much to the particular history of French syndicalism and, above all, to the unrivaled depth of political conflict concerning state-society relations in France. The radical and romantically pro-social, anti-statist character of France’s new citizenship movement contributed both to its initial appeal and later, as Chapter 5 will show, to its public delegitimation and political marginalization.
The hopes of new citizenship’s French advocates were also strikingly close to those of many Anglo-American post-nationalists and multiculturalists. Given these close underlying affinities, the story of the new citizenship campaign’s rise and fall in 1980s France promises also to tell us something about the appeal, and the limitations, of post-nationalist thinking as well. That story begins in this chapter and ends in Chapter 5.
